


your eyes still shined

by andchaos



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Coda, Homophobic Language, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-08
Updated: 2015-01-08
Packaged: 2018-03-06 15:56:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3140105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andchaos/pseuds/andchaos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Mickey pisses on first base.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your eyes still shined

**Author's Note:**

> So, I spent this whole fic not knowing what to title it until the very end when I realized that their ages aligned too perfectly with this song to not use it, so yes, the title's from ANOTHER Taylor Swift song: Mary's Song (Oh My My My). What can I say, I'm a sucker for gallavich in the key of tswift.
> 
> Anyway, this is the story of how Mickey pissed on first base and got kicked off the Little League team, and how Ian was there to witness the whole debacle.

Ian was seven, and he liked boys.

          Finding this out hadn’t been a revelation. A few years ago, at recess, he’d gone up to his friend Roger Spikey and told him about how his kindergarten teacher made his stomach flip and his lips stretch up into an irrepressible smile. Roger had told him, “That’s nice, kid.” (Roger was two grades above him.) “You into boys? Keep your trap shut though.” Roger hadn’t said why, but a few days later on his walk home from school Ian had witnessed Frank’s pot dealer beating up some scrawny kid in a back alley while Terry Milkovich egged him on, and Lip had pointed and informed him that this was called “fag-bashing.”

          “Should we stop them?” Ian had asked, gazing up at his brother with wide, innocent eyes.

          “Mess with the Milkoviches? What, you got a death wish?”

          Ian had not. He’d thought he’d known what Roger Spikey had meant about keeping his trap shut.

          (He didn’t; Roger had meant that he had to prove his heterosexuality, and bury his attraction to guys so far down that even his friends couldn’t find it. When Ian was eleven Roger Spikey would encourage him to date some girls for show, and when he was thirteen Roger Spikey would tell him that he was moving to Arizona, and then he would show Ian that he was the king of keeping secrets by kissing him. “Been wanting to that forever,” Roger would say, and then he’d teach Ian a few new things, none of which involved pants.)

          So, Ian was seven, and he liked boys. But he was not, after all this time, stupid. That didn’t mean he couldn’t appreciate the merchandise, though, even if he wasn’t allowed to buy. He was just… _covert_ about it. Still, when Monica had signed him up for the town baseball team (“It will be so great, baby! You can make so many new friends! Really, you shouldn’t be just hanging out with only Lip all the time.”) he had only protested in the half-hearted way that all little boys do when instructed by their mother to do anything. He actually liked the game—and his teammates were an unexpected bonus.

          Even though he was careful not to make his staring overt, how was he expected to _not_ check out the boys on his team? It was early July, and blistering hot; most of them had at least undone a few buttons, and a few had dispensed of their shirts entirely. Ian was too young to really _want_ them the way Fiona always talked about wanting Craig Heisner, but that didn’t mean he didn’t like to look.

          The coach had them gathered in the dugouts, squatting with his hands pressed to his knees as he looked around at his team of scruffy kids who all screamed of improper care.

          “Listen, this game’s gonna be a joke,” he said, pausing to spit off-color on the ground. Ian inched his foot away from the tobacco-stained spew. “These are all preppy little Northside assholes, alright? Probably never had to hit a real thing in their life. So you go out there, and you pretend the ball is their face.” He swiveled his head towards the end of the dugouts and called, “But no actually hitting them! You got me, Milkovich?”

          “Crystal clear, Coach!” came the sarcastic reply.

          Ian leaned forward on the bench as the coach rolled his eyes and went back to his pep talk. The boy he’d been talking to was all the way at the end of the line-up. He was turned sideways, leaning against the fence with his foot propped up on the bench and nudging the girl next to him in the thigh. His shirt was completely undone and his sleeves were cut off, and between that and the dirt scrubbed onto what seemed to be every inch of his body, he gave off a very clear signal that he was not to be messed with.

          Ian, of course, already knew this. Everybody in the Southside knew about the Milkovich family and their awful, violent reputation. He didn’t know much about the second-youngest, just that his name was Mickey and he liked to pick on all the kids at school, both above and below his grade level. Nobody really messed with him. He had a little sister in Ian’s grade, but Ian didn’t know Mandy that well. He had heard too much about her family to want to get too close to the black-haired little girl who wore a lot of skirts and flipped off all of her teachers.

          Ian had been staring too long; the coach had finished his speech and ordered everybody out onto the field. Ian stayed put, contemplating his newfound liking for cutoff sleeves, until almost the entire team had filed out the dugouts. Someone kicked at his foot, hard.

          “What the hell?” Ian yelped, but then he looked up and his voice died on the last word.

          Mickey Milkovich was staring down at him, hands on his hips and mouth twisted unhappily. His eyebrows were raised like he couldn’t decide whether to be amused or annoyed at Ian’s impertinence. Ian’s hands clamped down harder over the edge of the bench.

          “You comin’ or what, Freckleface?” Mickey asked.

          “Coming,” Ian said decisively, jumping to his feet.

          Mickey stared at him for a second longer, and Ian just stood there next to him, several inches shorter and distinctively scrawnier. He wondered if Mickey was going to kick him again, but then Mickey just huffed out an annoyed breath and started for the gate, Ian trailing along at his side.

          Mickey didn’t say anything while they walked, not bothering to hustle to catch up with their team even though the coach was yelling again. He seemed pissed off—as he usually did—and perfectly content to keep quiet, but Ian found the silence uncomfortable.

          “Why’d you join the baseball team?”

          Mickey startled, like he wasn’t used to people talking to him when he had that grimace fixed on his face. Ian thought he wasn’t going to answer, but after a few seconds he grunted, “I like hittin’ people.”

          Ignoring the clear dismissal, Ian ploughed on. “You shoulda joined hockey if you wanted to do that. My mom takes me and my siblings to games sometimes and they beat each other up all the time. Nobody really gets hit in baseball. But you beat people up at school all the time, don’t you? Why do you have to do it in your free time, too?”

          Mickey stared at him, but despite how deliberately irritated he made his tone, his expression betrayed him—if anything, he looked mildly amused at Ian’s audacity. He shrugged and said, “They gimme a bat here.”

          “Doesn’t your dad have a bat?”

          Mickey pulled up short, so that Ian didn’t realize he’d stopped walking until he was a few steps ahead of him, and he turned on his heel to look at him. All traces of good humor had disappeared from Mickey’s face, and he looked—in all his nine-year-old glory— _fearsome_. Mickey took a good twenty seconds to recover from what was apparently a huge slap in the face, but when he did shake himself from his paralysis, he strode forward and shoved Ian in the chest, hard. Ian stumbled back a few steps and fell to the ground. Mickey towered over him, flushed red with rage and utterly unapologetic.

          “Don’t you fuckin’ talk about my dad, got it?” he hissed. Without waiting for a reply, he stalked off in the direction of the bases.

          Ian sat there, hands splayed and ass hurting, until the Northside coach directed his kids onto the field. His own coach blew a whistle, yelling, “Gallagher, what the hell are you doing on the ground? Get up, you’re covering second!” Ian gathered his bearings again, pushed himself to his feet, and jogged off to his position.

          The game passed slowly; the Northside kids weren’t half as awful as expected, and they got a few runs in before the Southside team realized that they couldn’t just slack off and still win anyway. They stepped their game up when they went up to bat, and one girl hit a home run right before their last out. Ian glanced over at Mickey as they made their way back to the outfield to start the second inning, but the older boy wasn’t looking at him. He looked angry, though, angrier than he had in the dugout before his chat with Ian. Ian pulled back to keep himself out of Mickey’s line of sight as they jogged back to position.

          They got all the way into the top of inning four without incident. The Northside kids were winning, but just barely, and Ian’s teammates were starting to get pissed. Ian, for one, was pretty happy just playing, but he stepped his game up with everyone else, because he didn’t want to be on the wrong side of a group of angry Southside kids with bats. Mickey had started grinding his own bat into the sand one and a half innings ago, and he kept picking at the threads sticking out of his cutoff sleeves so that they were getting shorter by the minute. He looked more frustrated with his coach’s nagging than he did with the other team for scoring.

          “Milkovich!” their coach shouted, as Mickey stood idly by, just watching the ball soar over his head at a perfectly catchable distance. “What the hell are you doing? Catch the damn ball!”

          “Bite me!” Mickey called back, and Ian watched him thrust his middle fingers at their coach’s turned back. The crowd tittered unhappily, but Mickey just stuck his tongue out at them and crouched back into position. As someone else stepped up to bat, he turned his head without warning and glared in Ian’s direction.

          “The fuck’re you lookin’ at, Frotch?” he shouted.

          Ian wasn’t stupid enough to answer obvious bait from a ticked off Milkovich; he shrugged and, raking his eyes once over Mickey’s bared chest and arms, turned to watch the new kid up by the plate.

          Mickey got more unruly as the game went on. The Southside team’s irritation at Northside’s edge had them more erratic and unfocused than ever, and the more they fell behind, the redder the coach’s face got, and the more he focused his anger on the only kid not pulling his weight.

          “Hit the damn ball, Milkovich!”

          “Get back to your base before I put your sister in instead!” (“Go ahead!” Mickey called back. “She’d kick all your asses just for lookin’ at her wrong!”)

          “ _So help me, Milkovich—”_

          The more the coach laid into him, the more defiant and infuriated Mickey became, until he was shouting obscenities and not paying any attention to the game whatsoever. The rest of the team, including Ian, was starting to get annoyed with their rogue baseman, but nobody was willing to give him shit. If Mickey himself wasn’t scary enough, the threat of his brothers was enough to stop anyone from calling him out. Even Ian, who was no stranger to street brawls and fighting dirty on the playground, wasn’t fool enough to take on a boy with those types of rumors circling around him.

          The top of the fifth inning was just about to come to a close when some Northside girl playing with bracelets all up and down her arm stepped up to bat. She hit the ball with a resounding _crack_ , and it flew right at Mickey’s head. Everyone’s attention flitted between the girl, running as fast as she could towards Mickey’s base, and Mickey, who was standing there watching the ball fly at his face. At the last second, he raised his glove as though to catch it—

          –then swept some hair out of his eyes, and ducked.

          The ball flew right through where his nose had been a second before and landed a few yards behind him, rolling to a stop somewhere in the grass. Although he was closest to it still, Mickey made no move to get it. Instead, whistling with apparent unawareness, Mickey straightened, a self-satisfied smile gracing his features.

          The coach was livid.

          “Are you crazy, Milkovich?” he yelled. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? You stupid fucking animal! Were you raised in a goddamn doghouse? Who the hell do you think you are? If you join this team you’re gonna play the game, I don’t care if you think you’re some hot shit in the fourth grade, you don’t get to disrespect me, you don’t get to disrespect this game. Get your ass in gear or you are fucking out of here!”

          The coach would come to practice the following weekend with double black eyes, a sprained ankle, and a funny wheeze to his voice indicative of severely hurt ribs, but Mickey would only pick absently at his nails and deny any knowledge of the man’s injuries.

          In the moment, though, Mickey flushed red, his hands curling into fists. Ian, through struck dumb at his coach’s nerve, immediately resolved to stand up to Mickey Milkovich more often. Aside from the sheer bravery that yelling at a Milkovich required, Ian’s envy was even surpassed by a kind of delighted fascination; Mickey really did look amazing when upset, a tiny shaking boy trying his hardest to frighten. Ian stifled a giggle. Because Mickey had a solid three or four inches on him, Ian had never noticed before just how _un_ intimidating he looked, less than four feet tall and trying to swell to his father’s size. It was kind of adorable.

          “Oh yeah?” Mickey shouted back. “Fuck you, don’t worry about it!” And before anyone could stop him, he jerked down the zipper on his baseball pants and peed all over first base.

          Ian clapped a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing. Quite apart from how much he was enjoying the show, it was the first time he’d seen so much of a boy that wasn’t himself. He also found it thoroughly entertaining that the Northside mothers and fathers all gasped and turned away in unison, desperately trying to cover their children’s eyes.

          When he was done, Mickey tucked himself back into his pants and turned back to his coach. “I’ll see myself out,” he called, and he turned and marched off the field, his middle fingers visible over his retreating shoulders.

          The game didn’t resume for twenty minutes. The coaches on both teams hailed down the ref for a time out, and they hustled the kids back into their respective dugouts.  While his coach yelled himself hoarse, Ian bit at his nails and stared off through the holes in the fence in the direction that Mickey had disappeared. He was so busy replaying the whole spectacle in his mind that he was once again last to exit the dugout when the ref called them all back to play. Their replacement first baseman wasn’t nearly as interesting as the black-haired boy who cursed too much, which meant that the rest of the game actually passed kind of smoothly. Northside won, because despite his attitude problems Mickey was actually pretty good at hitting things hard, but everyone seemed mostly relieved to be shot of him as they finished up the last two innings.

          On the ride home, Ian stared out the window, tuning out Monica as she chattered about how “exciting” and “fun” Little League was, and wasn’t Ian so glad she had signed him up? But his mind wasn’t on the game, or the loss, or even on Mickey, the way he’d pissed all over the field and flipped everyone off as he left.

          Ian was thinking about what Roger Spikey had said three years ago, when Ian had accidentally come out to him at recess: _“Keep your trap shut though.”_ And a few days later, when Lip had said, _“That’s fag-bashing, kiddo.”_

          Ian liked boys, and Mickey was dangerous.

          But Mickey also looked good with his sleeves cut off. He unbuttoned his baseball shirts at practice and sweated when he played. His tongue poked out the side of his mouth when he ran particularly fast. His pale cheeks flushed pink when he was angry, and his hands curled into fists when he was upset. He yelled, he cursed, he peed on first base and got himself kicked off of Little League teams.

          Ian was seven, and he liked boys. Mickey was nine, and he was dangerous.

          Ian didn’t stop thinking about him for three weeks.


End file.
